Introduction to Darwinism
In 1860 Thomas Henry Huxley introduced the term Darwinism in relation to Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, published the year before. Darwin's book presented natural selection as the means of biological evolution, as seen in the full title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwinism, then, is correctly understood as the body of theory dealing with biological evolution in general and evolution by natural selection in particular. In 1864 the philosopher Herbert Spencer summed up Darwinism with the phrase "survival of the fittest." Darwin approved of this summation as an accurate and convenient expression of his basic theory.
In 1860 Thomas Henry Huxley introduced the term Darwinism in relation to Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, published the year before. Darwin's book presented natural selection as the means of biological evolution, as seen in the full title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwinism, then, is correctly understood as the body of theory dealing with biological evolution in general and evolution by natural selection in particular. In 1864 the philosopher Herbert Spencer summed up Darwinism with the phrase "survival of the fittest." Darwin approved of this summation as an accurate and convenient expression of his basic theory.
Why is it important to refute Darwinism?
Children in our schools and institutions are taught that humans evolved from apes. But the Bible states that God created Adam and Eve. Which one of these is correct? I had this question when I was learning about Darwinism in school. As a result, it is critical to disprove it since our youngsters are being misled into accepting theories that exclude God and faith. However, as we go through this collection of writings, you'll notice that believing in Darwinism requires more faith than believing in Creationism/Intelligent Design.
Children in our schools and institutions are taught that humans evolved from apes. But the Bible states that God created Adam and Eve. Which one of these is correct? I had this question when I was learning about Darwinism in school. As a result, it is critical to disprove it since our youngsters are being misled into accepting theories that exclude God and faith. However, as we go through this collection of writings, you'll notice that believing in Darwinism requires more faith than believing in Creationism/Intelligent Design.
Refuting Darwinism
Here are three lines of evidence to prove Darwinism is wrong:
Here are three lines of evidence to prove Darwinism is wrong:
Complex Life and DNA:
Sixteen-year-old Johnny came down from his bedroom and stumbled into the kitchen to get a bowl of his favourite cereal—chocos. When he got to the table, he was surprised to see that the cereal box was knocked over, and the chocos letters spelled "TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE—MOM" on the table.
Sixteen-year-old Johnny came down from his bedroom and stumbled into the kitchen to get a bowl of his favourite cereal—chocos. When he got to the table, he was surprised to see that the cereal box was knocked over, and the chocos letters spelled "TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE—MOM" on the table.
Recalling a recent high school biology lesson, Johnny didn't attribute the message to his mom. After all, he'd just been taught that life itself is merely a product of mindless, natural laws. If that's the case, Johnny thought, why couldn't a simple message like "Take out the garbage—Mom" be the product of mindless natural laws as well? Maybe the cat knocked the box over, or an earthquake shook the house. No sense jumping to conclusions. Johnny didn't want to take out the garbage anyway.
One needs to be playing with only half a deck or be wilfully blind to suggest that a message like "Take out the garbage—Mom" is the work of natural laws. Yet these conclusions are perfectly consistent with principles taught in most high school and college biology classes today. That's where naturalistic biologists dogmatically assert that messages far more complicated are the mindless products of natural laws. They make this claim in trying to explain the origin of life. Naturalistic biologists assert that life generated spontaneously from non living chemicals by natural laws without any intelligent intervention. Such a theory might have seemed plausible to a nineteenth-century scientist who didn't have the technology to investigate the cell and discover its amazing complexity. But today this naturalistic theory flies in the face of everything we know about natural laws and biological systems.
Since the 1950s, advancing technology has enabled scientists to discover a tiny world of awesome design and astonishing complexity. At the same time that our telescopes are seeing farther out into space, our microscopes are seeing deeper into the components of life. While our space observations have yielded the Anthropic Principle of physics (which we discussed in the last chapter), our life observations are yielding an equally impressive Anthropic Principle of biology. Let's consider so called "simple" life—a one-celled animal known as an amoeba.
Naturalistic evolutionists claim that this one-celled amoeba (or something like it) came together by spontaneous generation (i.e., without intelligent intervention) in a warm little pond somewhere on the very early earth. According to their theory, all biological life has evolved from that first amoeba without any intelligent guidance at all. This, of course, is the theory of macroevolution.
Believers in this theory of origin are called by many names: naturalistic evolutionists, materialists, humanists, atheists, and Darwinists. Regardless of what we call the true believers in this theory, the key question for us is this: "Is their theory true?" It appears not.
Forget the Darwinist assertions about men descending from apes or birds evolving from reptiles. The supreme problem for Darwinists is not explaining how all life forms are related. The supreme problem for Darwinists is explaining the origin of the first life. For unguided, naturalistic macroevolution to be true, the first life must have generated spontaneously from non-living chemicals. Unfortunately for Darwinists, the first life—indeed any form of life—is by no means "simple." This became abundantly clear in 1953 when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the chemical that encodes instructions for building and replicating all living things.
DNA has a helical structure that looks like a twisted ladder. The sides of the ladder are formed by alternating deoxyribose and phosphate molecules, and the rungs of the ladder consist of a specific order of four nitrogen bases. These nitrogen bases are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, which commonly are represented by the letters A, T, C, and G. These letters comprise what is known as the four-letter genetic alphabet. This alphabet is identical to our English alphabet in terms of its ability to communicate a message, except that the genetic alphabet has only four letters instead of twenty-six. Just as the specific order of the letters in this sentence communicates a unique message, the specific order of A, T, C, and G within a living cell determines the unique genetic makeup of that living entity. Another name for that message or information, whether it's in a sentence or in DNA, is "specified complexity."
In other words, not only is it complex—it also contains a specific message. The incredible specified complexity of life becomes obvious when one considers the message found in the DNA of a one-celled amoeba (a creature so small, several hundred could be lined up in an inch). Staunch Darwinist Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoebas more than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica! In other words, if you were to spell out all of the A, T, C, and G in the "unjustly called 'primitive' amoeba" (as Dawkins describes it), the letters would fill 1,000 complete sets of an encyclopaedia!
Now, we must emphasize that these 1,000 encyclopaedias do not consist of random letters but of letters in a very specific order—just like real encyclopaedias. So, here's the key question for Darwinists like Dawkins: if a simple message such as "Take out the garbage—Mom," require an intelligent being, then why doesn't a message 1,000 encyclopaedias long require one? Darwinists can't answer that question by showing how natural laws could do the job. Instead, they define the rules of science so narrowly that intelligence is ruled out in advance, leaving natural laws as the only game in town.
Investigating the origin of first life
Many evolutionists as well as many creationists speak as if they know beyond any doubt, how the first life came into existence. Both, of course, cannot be right. If one is right, the other is wrong. So how can we discover who's right? The following fact is obvious but often overlooked: no human observed the origin of the first life. The emergence of the first life on earth was a one-time, unrepeatable historical event. No one was present to see it-neither evolutionists nor creationists were there, and we certainly can't travel back in time and directly observe whether the first life was created by some kind of intelligence or arose by natural laws from non-living materials.
Many evolutionists as well as many creationists speak as if they know beyond any doubt, how the first life came into existence. Both, of course, cannot be right. If one is right, the other is wrong. So how can we discover who's right? The following fact is obvious but often overlooked: no human observed the origin of the first life. The emergence of the first life on earth was a one-time, unrepeatable historical event. No one was present to see it-neither evolutionists nor creationists were there, and we certainly can't travel back in time and directly observe whether the first life was created by some kind of intelligence or arose by natural laws from non-living materials.
That raises an important question: if we can't directly observe the past, then what scientific principles can we use to help us discover what caused the first life? We use the same principles that are utilized every day in our criminal justice system-forensic principles. In other words, the origin of life is a forensic question that requires us to piece together evidence much like detectives piece together evidence from a murder. Detectives can't go back in time and witness the murder again. Neither can they revive the victim and go into the laboratory to conduct some kind of experiment that will allow them to observe and repeat the crime over and over again. Instead, they must utilize the principles of forensic science to discover what really happened.
The central principle in forensic science is the Principle of Uniformity, which holds that causes in the past were like the causes we observe today. In other words, by the Principle of Uniformity, we assume that the world worked in the past just like it works today, especially when it comes to causes. If "Take out the garbage-Mom" requires an intelligent cause today, then any similar message from the past must also require an intelligent cause. Conversely, if natural laws can do the job today, then the Principle of Uniformity would lead us to conclude natural laws could do the job in the past.
Consider the Grand Canyon. What caused it? Did anyone see it form? No, but by the Principle of Uniformity, we can conclude that natural processes, particularly water erosion, were responsible for the Grand Canyon. We can conclude this confidently, even though we were not there to see it happen, because we can observe these natural processes creating canyons today. We see this in nature when we observe water's effect on a land mass. We can even go into the laboratory and repeatedly pour water in the middle of a mass of dirt, and we'll always get a canyon.
Now consider another geologic formation: Mount Rushmore. What caused it? Common sense tells us that we would never suggest that the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore were the result of natural laws. Erosion couldn't have done that. Our "common sense" is actually the Principle of Uniformity. Since we never observe natural laws chiselling a highly detailed sculpture of a president's head into stone at the present time, we rightly conclude that natural laws couldn't have done it in the past either. Today we see only intelligent beings creating detailed sculptures. As a result, we rightly conclude that, in the past, only an intelligent being (a sculptor) could have created the faces on Mount Rushmore. In the same way, when we look at the first one-celled life, the Principle of Uniformity tells us that only an intelligent cause could assemble the equivalent of 1,000 encyclopaedias. Natural laws never have been observed to create a simple message like "Drink Coke," much less a message 1,000 encyclopaedias long.
Why then do Darwinists come to the conclusion that the first life generated spontaneously from non-living chemicals without intelligent intervention? Spontaneous generation of life has never been observed. Ever since Pasteur sterilized his flask, one of the most fundamental observations in all of science has been that life arises only from similar existing life. Scientists have been unable to combine chemicals in a test tube and arrive at a DNA molecule, much less life. In fact, all experiments designed to spontaneously generate life-including the now discredited Urey-Miller experiment-have not only failed but also suffer from the illegitimate application of intelligence. In other words, scientists intelligently contrive experiments and they still cannot do what we are told mindless natural laws have done. Why should we believe, that mindless processes can do what brilliant scientists cannot do? And even if scientists eventually did create life in the laboratory, it would prove creation. Why? Because their efforts would show that it takes a lot of intelligence to create life.
Do Darwinists insist on spontaneous generation because they just don't see the evidence for design? Not at all. In fact, exactly the opposite is true they see the evidence clearly! For example, Richard Dawkins named his book The Blind Watchmaker in response to William Paley's design argument we cited in the last chapter. The appearance of design in life is admitted on the first page of The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins writes, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Two pages later, despite acknowledging "the intricate architecture and precision engineering" in human life and in each of the trillions of cells within the human body, Dawkins flatly denies that human life or any other life has been designed. Apparently, Dawkins refuses to allow observation to interfere with his conclusions. This is very strange for a man who believes in the supremacy of science, which is supposed to be based on observation.
Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA and another ardent Darwinist, agrees with Dawkins about the appearance of design. In fact, the appearance of design is so clear he warns that "biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." Crick's little memo to biologists led Phillip Johnson, author and a leader in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, to observe, "Darwinian biologists must keep repeating that reminder to themselves because otherwise they might become conscious of the reality that is staring them in the face and trying to get their attention."
The complexity of DNA is not the only problem for Darwinists. Its origin is also a problem. A difficult chicken-egg dilemma exists because DNA relies on proteins for its production but proteins rely on DNA for their production. So, which came first, proteins or DNA? One must already be in existence for the other to be made. So why do Crick, Dawkins, and others in their camp ignore the plain implications of the evidence staring them in the face? Because their preconceived ideology-naturalism prevents them from even considering an intelligent cause. This is bad science and it leads to wrong conclusions.
Microevolution vs Macroevolution
First, microevolution occurs through typical reproduction. All organisms have heritable variety which means that their DNA, while consistent across the species, may be expressed in different ways based on the combination of dominant and recessive traits in offspring. Next, it happens through natural selection in which individuals with traits better suited to survive in an environment are more likely to reproduce and pass those traits down to the next generation. Also, it takes place through gene flow or migration in which a genetic variation is transferred when an individual moves from one population to another. In addition, it can occur through genetic drift in which the frequency of an allele changes due to a random selection of certain genes. Finally, mutations change the DNA in an individual through removing something, thus leading to a different variation of a trait.
First, microevolution occurs through typical reproduction. All organisms have heritable variety which means that their DNA, while consistent across the species, may be expressed in different ways based on the combination of dominant and recessive traits in offspring. Next, it happens through natural selection in which individuals with traits better suited to survive in an environment are more likely to reproduce and pass those traits down to the next generation. Also, it takes place through gene flow or migration in which a genetic variation is transferred when an individual moves from one population to another. In addition, it can occur through genetic drift in which the frequency of an allele changes due to a random selection of certain genes. Finally, mutations change the DNA in an individual through removing something, thus leading to a different variation of a trait.
Macroevolution purportedly involves the alteration of genetic material over a long period of time leading to the creation of new species. Evolutionists believe that the first single-celled organism appeared on Earth around 3.8 billion years ago. Universal Common Descent is the commonly accepted theory that all life forms share this organism as a common ancestor. The theory goes that through the accumulation of micro changes over time it developed into the first fish, which in turn led to the development of amphibians, then reptiles, and eventually mammals. The process of macroevolution occurs at or above a species level rather than within a species. It is said to be the result of the compounded alterations produced by reproduction, natural selection, gene flow/migration, genetic drift, and mutation. The shared ancestor did not contain all the DNA present in living creatures today, so genetic material was added as one species transitioned into a new one. An example of macroevolution would be the transition from an ape-like ancestor into both the apes and humans of today.
Darwinists say this has happened by natural selection. But the term "natural selection" is a misnomer. Since the process of evolution is, by definition, without intelligence, there is no "selection" at all going on. It's a blind process. The term "natural selection" simply means that the fittest creatures survive. So what? That's true by definition-the fittest survive (this is called a tautology-a circular argument that doesn't prove anything). Logically, these are the creatures that are best equipped genetically or structurally to deal with changing environmental conditions (that's why they survive).
But macroevolution is exactly what Darwinists claim from the data. They say that these observable micro changes can be extrapolated to prove that unobservable macroevolution has occurred. They make no distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, and thus use the evidence for micro to prove macro. By failing to make this critical distinction, Darwinists can dupe the general public into thinking that any observable change in any organism proves that all life has evolved from the first one-celled creature.
This is why it is essential that the right distinctions be made and that all hidden assumptions be exposed when discussing the creation-evolution controversy. So, if someone ever asks you, "Do you believe in evolution?" you should ask that person, "What do you mean by evolution? Do you mean micro- or macroevolution?" Microevolution has been observed; but it cannot be used as evidence for macroevolution, which has never been observed.
Christians can accept microevolution as true. It has been proven through observable examples in nature and it supports the Genesis 1 account of animals multiplying according to their kind. It does not call for the creation of new genetic material, but works within the existing genetics to allow species to adapt as environments and circumstances change. Macroevolution, however, is not supported by evidence and goes against the Genesis account of creation.
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